Driving Customer Success Through Cloud Native Enterprise Software Architecture: A Conversation with HCL Software’s Mark Edwards

HCL Software doesn’t just acquire enduring software products — it is on a mission to drive customer success through relentless innovation of its products, particularly in cloud native architecture.

Since its inception five years ago, the software division of HCL Technologies has grown into a $1.1B business with over 4500 employees in 45 countries. It supports 30 product families across Customer Experience, Digital Solutions, Secure DevOps, and Security and Automation.

Silicon Foundry spoke to HCL Software’s Global Director of Strategy, Mark Edwards, about how the company invests in, develops, markets, and sells mission-critical enterprise software products in order to deliver value to its customers.

Let’s start with the HCL Software story. What do you do?

When we established HCL Software back in 2016, we aspired to build a world-class enterprise software business by driving customer success through product innovation. We started by assembling software products in our core focus areas. We’ve now made those products available as a cloud native platform where they can be easily deployed into public, private and hybrid clouds. This is available to over 20,000 of our customers, who have run these software products only on prem for many years.

The ability to develop, market, sell, and support over 30 product families requires a strong focus on technical expertise and operational discipline. That expertise and dedication underpins how we run our business and how we leverage the needs of our customers to deliver meaningful innovations that enable highly regulated industries.

Tell us about your products.

Our large-scale R&D team continues to advance HCL Software products and make them better with every single release, across all our core focus areas. Here’s a rundown of what we offer:

● HCL Customer Experience products deliver impactful end user experiences across all brand touch points and interactions.

● HCL Digital Solutions offerings deliver digital transformation and workplace solutions for connected enterprises.

● From Mainframe to Microservices, HCL Secure DevOps offerings provide the security, automation, visibility, governance, and control needed to deliver higher quality software, faster.

● HCL Security and Automation offerings provide capabilities to secure enterprise endpoints and applications and fully automate discovery, management, automation, and remediation, whether it’s on–prem or cloud, regardless of location or connectivity.

Tell us about HCL SoFy.

HCL (Solution Factory) SoFy, our crown jewel, is a cloud native platform that transformed over 50 traditional on-prem products to support the latest cloud standards. 2,000+ REST API endpoints make it easier for developers to extend, integrate, and customize enterprise systems. We also created self-service, cloud delivered demos and trials to provide our customers with fast hands-on experiences. SoFy transforms the way our customers think about their software and their perception of the software vendor that truly helps them achieve success.

What’s next for HCL Software?

Our customers, partners, and people will always inspire our drive to excel at what we do, and how we do it. We understand that delivering on our mission is a journey that requires strategic investments, product harmonization strategies, and enhanced cloud native offerings. We continue to organically grow and explore portfolio expansion and software partnership opportunities that empower global businesses and organizations to create tangible long-term value for everyone.

For more information about HCL Software, please visit: https://www.hcltechsw.com/cloud-native